IE9 Release Postponed in Japan

According to an announcement made by Microsoft Japan (via Ankur Mittal), Internet Explorer 9 will not be offered on March 14th, 2011 to the users in the land of the rising sun, when it’s scheduled to go live for the rest of the world.

As the software giant announced previously, IE9 will be released to web later today, at 9 p.m. Pacific Time USA, which would make it March 15th in Japan, explaining the date used in the software giant’s announcement.

The decision to delay the launch of the Japanese language version of IE9 RTW will not impact the other localized flavors of the browser, the company underlined.

Unless you live under a rock, you undoubtedly know that Japan is currently struggling to recover from a 8.9 magnitude earthquake that took place last week, followed by a devastating tsunami.

Microsoft Japan explains that it needs to protect the integrity of the communications infrastructure, and that it postponed the IE9 release to web in Japan in order to avoid network bandwidth overload.

The company hasn’t provided an estimate when the Japanese language version of IE9 RTW will be offered to the public, but as the country will emerge from the natural disaster that hit it, downloads are bound to go live.

In fact, the promise from Microsoft is that it will assess the situation following the progress of the relief efforts and decide on an availability deadline for IE9 RTW in Japan at a later date.

The death toll and the extent of the damages following the Friday earthquake and tsunami are still unknown at this point in time, with Japanese authorities also working to avoid a potential nuclear crisis as one of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant reactors can no longer be cooled, having been rocked by several explosions already.